transport it. Besides, if any of the people over there saw me they’d think I was cracked. So it’s in the bath. I carted up a couple of buckets of sea-water and tipped them over it. Don’t know what Rex’ll say if he sees it there. It’s still alive — it looks up at me when I go in to check it, looks up at me with its lovely eyes.
Rex has turned his mower off and he’s climbed up the water tank to check the level. There’s been no rain for ages, but it’s a big tank and I’m careful. Don’t know why he worries.
‘Mum!’ He’s calling me. ‘Mum!’
I put my head out the bathroom window.
‘What’re you doing in there?’ he asks. ‘You’ve been in there for ages. You feeling crook?’
I shake my head.
‘I’m going to have a drink with Valmai,’ he says. ‘See you later.’ And he’s climbing down the ladder quick-sticks, because I usually whine at him and suggest that a cup of tea with me would be better for his health.
In the kitchen I open a tin of sardines and feed them to the octopus one by one. While I’m doing it, perching on the lav and leaning over, dropping them in, I remember from one of Rex’s school books that octopuses don’t usually have mouths, they have a kind of beak. This must be a rare breed, maybe a new one none of the scientists know about. It opens its mouth obedient as a baby in a highchair, and swallows the sardines whole, becauseit doesn’t have any teeth. When it’s finished its mouth keeps moving, as if it’s still hungry or trying to say something, the mouth pursing, pushing air in and out.
‘Oy Joy’ it says, but I’m not sure if that’s it; I’m not sure that’s what it’s trying to say, I’m not sure at all.
Red Lolly
When I was a girl, my Papa would say to me — he was a New Zealander who met my mother here in France during the War — he would say to me, ‘Stop playing to the crowd! Stop holding the floor!’ he would say. ‘Get back in your box.’ He did not understand that, for me, to turn away from an admiring face is entirely against my nature; he could not comprehend that his idiomatic command to retreat to my box only brought into my mind a horrifying image of myself lying in my shroud, hands clasped.
So, I have played to audiences real or imagined all of my life — and it has brought me no end of pleasure. I like to imagine what thoughts go through their minds, every detail of their appreciation of me. Right now, for instance, there is a boy, outside the beach kiosk, watching me. He has two sisters flanking him, but they are younger and more interested in the twenty flavours of ice-cream brought down to Menton fromNice, some of them so disgusting that just to read their names is enough to make one bilious: beer, licorice, mimosa.
The boy’s mother has seen me now too, and she pauses in the lighting of her cigarette. It is hot today and I can see she is overdressed and bothered, and would like to be like me, stretched out on my foam-rubber pallet, entirely oiled and lying on my back in the sun. Would her breasts be as beautiful as mine, as firm to the touch, as sweetly positioned on the top of her chest? Mine are smooth with silicone, buoyant and brown. Would her stomach be like mine, sculptured stone? Would her limbs be as fleshless?
They don’t have the technology yet for my neck, for my upper arms, my thighs — though it’s on its way and will be available by the time my admirer requires it. Smoking now, about forty and overdue for some eye-work, she is sitting on a low brick wall on the other side of the narrow road between the beach and the row of kiosks.
And she will require the work eventually, my admirer, who is drawing in toxic smoke over there, watching me. Every woman in the world will want it, eternal youth — and if they can afford it, most will succumb. The money I’ve spent! From my third husband I inherited a fortune — and most of it is gone.
When I sit up the beach spins around me — the brown of the
Rex has turned his mower off and he’s climbed up the water tank to check the level. There’s been no rain for ages, but it’s a big tank and I’m careful. Don’t know why he worries.
‘Mum!’ He’s calling me. ‘Mum!’
I put my head out the bathroom window.
‘What’re you doing in there?’ he asks. ‘You’ve been in there for ages. You feeling crook?’
I shake my head.
‘I’m going to have a drink with Valmai,’ he says. ‘See you later.’ And he’s climbing down the ladder quick-sticks, because I usually whine at him and suggest that a cup of tea with me would be better for his health.
In the kitchen I open a tin of sardines and feed them to the octopus one by one. While I’m doing it, perching on the lav and leaning over, dropping them in, I remember from one of Rex’s school books that octopuses don’t usually have mouths, they have a kind of beak. This must be a rare breed, maybe a new one none of the scientists know about. It opens its mouth obedient as a baby in a highchair, and swallows the sardines whole, becauseit doesn’t have any teeth. When it’s finished its mouth keeps moving, as if it’s still hungry or trying to say something, the mouth pursing, pushing air in and out.
‘Oy Joy’ it says, but I’m not sure if that’s it; I’m not sure that’s what it’s trying to say, I’m not sure at all.
Red Lolly
When I was a girl, my Papa would say to me — he was a New Zealander who met my mother here in France during the War — he would say to me, ‘Stop playing to the crowd! Stop holding the floor!’ he would say. ‘Get back in your box.’ He did not understand that, for me, to turn away from an admiring face is entirely against my nature; he could not comprehend that his idiomatic command to retreat to my box only brought into my mind a horrifying image of myself lying in my shroud, hands clasped.
So, I have played to audiences real or imagined all of my life — and it has brought me no end of pleasure. I like to imagine what thoughts go through their minds, every detail of their appreciation of me. Right now, for instance, there is a boy, outside the beach kiosk, watching me. He has two sisters flanking him, but they are younger and more interested in the twenty flavours of ice-cream brought down to Menton fromNice, some of them so disgusting that just to read their names is enough to make one bilious: beer, licorice, mimosa.
The boy’s mother has seen me now too, and she pauses in the lighting of her cigarette. It is hot today and I can see she is overdressed and bothered, and would like to be like me, stretched out on my foam-rubber pallet, entirely oiled and lying on my back in the sun. Would her breasts be as beautiful as mine, as firm to the touch, as sweetly positioned on the top of her chest? Mine are smooth with silicone, buoyant and brown. Would her stomach be like mine, sculptured stone? Would her limbs be as fleshless?
They don’t have the technology yet for my neck, for my upper arms, my thighs — though it’s on its way and will be available by the time my admirer requires it. Smoking now, about forty and overdue for some eye-work, she is sitting on a low brick wall on the other side of the narrow road between the beach and the row of kiosks.
And she will require the work eventually, my admirer, who is drawing in toxic smoke over there, watching me. Every woman in the world will want it, eternal youth — and if they can afford it, most will succumb. The money I’ve spent! From my third husband I inherited a fortune — and most of it is gone.
When I sit up the beach spins around me — the brown of the
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